Earth: A Tiny, Pale, Blue Dot

Across the Fence #306

I have a book called Wisconsin Starwatch by Mike Lynch. It helps put some of the scientific and astronomical distances into perspective. For instance:

The Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the moon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s made the lunar voyage in about three days. Keep in mind that the moon is only 222,000 to 252,000 miles from the earth at any given phase in its orbit. At the rate Apollo traveled, it would take around 450 billion years for it to reach the Andromeda Galaxy... our next-door neighbor and closest galaxy! Just since the Hubble Telescope began searching beyond our galaxy, billions of galaxies, over 13 billion light years away, have been found. Just over eighty years ago, astronomers believed the Milky Way was all there was to the universe!

Mike Lynch likes to scale down sizes and distances to better understand them. For example, if you shrink the sun’s diameter from 864,000 miles to about the size of a period on this page, then on that same scale, the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, is more than 5 miles away, the diameter of the Milky Way is more than 120,000 miles, and the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is 3 million miles.

Those are mind-boggling numbers and facts. No one can tell me there isn't other life out there somewhere. Things have changed drastically within our lifetime and have opened up whole new worlds. I find that very exciting, and it stimulates my thinking. I find it very hard to understand how some people still believe that life as we know it is only 10,000 years old!!

In 1990, after the Voyager 1 spacecraft was at the end of its primary mission, Carl Sagan lobbied NASA to turn the spacecraft around and take a photograph of earth from the distant edge of our solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, at approximately 3.7 billion miles away.

The result was a picture showing earth as a fraction of a pixel, a tiny, pale blue dot in the vastness of space.

Later, in a commencement address delivered on May 11, 1996, Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena…

“Its been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan covers a lot of ground with those words. This tiny, blue dot is our home. It’s been home for countless generations before us, and hopefully countless generations after us. When you look at earth from space there are no borders or fences on this tiny, blue dot. You don’t see different colors of people, different religions, different beliefs, and different political parties, that always seem to be arguing and fighting over who is right, and trying to kill each other.

Stargazing in the country on a dark, clear night, puts everything into perspective. In this time of big-city living, I’d be willing to bet that most people have never taken time to star gaze. Not that they could see anything, even if they tried. City lights block out the stars, imprisoning people in their own little world, unable to see the life and wonders beyond that narrow perspective.

Just as a prisoner needs to break free in order to experience life outside the prison walls, we need to break free and head to the countryside in order to see life beyond our earthly boundaries. This has become very evident to me since we moved to the country near Westby.

Here in the countryside, unhindered by city lights and pollution, we can look up and have the experience of seeing the night sky filled with stars, literally billions of them. It’s an awesome and humbling experience as a person contemplates the enormity of it all.

It puts everything back into perspective. When I look out at the billions of stars, I realize I’m a minor blip on this tiny, pale, blue dot. I’m not the center of the universe. But, I also feel special, knowing that I’m part of all this, and I marvel at the complexity of life forces that brought this entire world, and everything in it, into existence. Is all this merely chance, a roll of the evolutionary dice, or is this tiny, pale, blue dot part of some master plan?

Those are just some of my thoughts, as I stargazed on a clear, cool, autumn evening.